Obama Strikes Personal Note as He Urges Help for Addiction

Image

President Obama listened to Carey Dixon's account of a loved one's struggle with substance abuse during a panel discussion Wednesday at the East End Family Resource Center in Charleston, W.Va.CreditCreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — President Obama came on Wednesday to a hotbed of one of the deadliest epidemics in American history and, as he had at a prison in Oklahoma in July, saw a life he might have led in the stories of drug addicts and their parents.

“I did stuff, and I’ve been very honest about it,” he said, referring to his admissions of illegal drug use in his youth. “So when I think about it, there but for the grace of God.”

The stories of those who nearly lost children to addiction seemed to affect him the most, and he again likened parenthood to “having your heart walk around outside your body.” Poor and minority children are more vulnerable but are as deserving of being saved, he said.

“It could be Malia or Sasha or Cary’s kids or any of our kids,” he said, referring to his own daughters and those of Cary Dixon, a local mother. “Those kids don’t always look like us, don’t live in the same neighborhoods as us. They’re just as precious.”

The president made those remarks after listening to the stories of the mother of an addict, a health officer and a police chief in front of an audience of about 200 people at the East End Family Resource Center. Mr. Obama started the event with a brief speech during which he rattled off a litany of sobering statistics.

“More Americans now die every year from drug overdoses than they do from motor vehicle crashes,” Mr. Obama said. “The majority of those overdoses involve legal prescription drugs. I don’t have to tell you, this is a terrible toll.”

So far, Mr. Obama’s efforts to combat that toll, one of the few public health epidemics to substantially worsen during his tenure, have been modest and largely ineffective. Many federal officials, including at the Food and Drug Administration, have opposed efforts to ban new opioid products or significantly restrict access to the pills, fearing that such measures would deny treatment to those genuinely in need of pain medication.

The result is that while the epidemic has leveled off somewhat, it shows no signs of abating, leading addiction experts to complain about the president’s response. Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the chief medical officer of the Phoenix House Foundation in New York, noted that more than 120,000 Americans had died of drug overdoses during Mr. Obama’s tenure.

“And this is the first time in his presidency he’s speaking to a live audience about the problem?” Dr. Kolodny asked.

Dr. Kolodny said that Mr. Obama’s reaction to the opioid epidemic could be compared to former President Ronald Reagan’s tepid response to the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic, long seen as a blot on his legacy.

“The most urgent public health problem facing this country gets worse every year he’s been president, and he’s done almost nothing,” Dr. Kolodny said.

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama announced several modest measures to combat the problem, including further training for federal doctors and a request that federal health insurance plans address barriers to addiction treatment. Many addicts die while waiting for spots in treatment programs.

But Mr. Obama said that far greater investments needed to be made in the prevention and treatment of addiction. The president, a former smoker, said that the continued decline in smoking rates showed that progress could be made against addiction.

“We’re going to have to build and fund and support more treatment centers,” he said to applause, adding that there was growing bipartisan backing on Capitol Hill for such funding.

Mr. Obama said that the billions of dollars that would be saved from easing sentencing guidelines for nonviolent offenders and not incarcerating drug addicts could be spent on treatment programs. Once programs are established to treat addiction to legal drugs, he said, people might be more accepting of treatment programs for addiction to illegal drugs.

Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, who traveled to his home state with Mr. Obama on Air Force One, made clear in his own remarks that he believed the federal government must do much more.

“We have our own F.D.A. allowing things on the market that shouldn’t be coming on,” Mr. Manchin said to applause.

Dr. Carl R. Sullivan, the director of addiction services at the West Virginia University School of Medicine, said that while the administration’s efforts had so far been negligible, he left Wednesday’s event more hopeful than he had been in a decade.

“I thought the president was incredibly personable and incredibly engaged with this problem, much more so than I envisioned,” Dr. Sullivan said. “He seemed to understand it on both a scientific, political and even personal level. I’m now hopeful this administration is going to come through with the goods and give us the tools to deal with the epidemic.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Strikes Personal Note as He Urges Help for Addiction . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe